Is Comiskey Upper Deck A Problem?

To A Degree

At New Park, Baseball's Game Of Inches Is A Matter Of Slope, Feet And Rows

September 19, 1993|By Blair Kamin, Tribune Architecture Critic.

Further compensating for the slope, every niche of the three-tiered, 2,400-seat hall has a sense of intimacy. From the front row of the upper balcony, it's just 80 feet to the stage, a distance that almost makes you feel as though you could reach out and snatch the baton from the hands of symphony conductor Daniel Barenboim.

Auditorium Theatre's contrast

The 4,000-seat Auditorium Theatre, mainly a home to touring Broadway shows, offers another telling contrast to Comiskey. It, too, has a steeply pitched upper balcony-this one a potentially terrifying 41 degrees, or 6 degrees steeper than at Comiskey.

Designed by the celebrated architectural team of Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, the 105-year-old theater was built primarily as a showcase for grand opera. As a result, it is a performing arts venue in which sightlines count as much as sound.

All seats are within 165 feet of the stage, and the upper reaches of the three-tiered hall are steeply raked to provide unobstructed views. Yet the sloping effect of the upper balcony's 41-degree pitch is lessened by the fact that it has just seven rows of seats compared to 29 rows in Comiskey's upper deck. In other words, it doesn't feel like an Olympic ski jump.

A similar perceptual trick occurs in the upper balcony of Chicago Stadium, designed by the firm of Hall, Lawrence & Ratcliffe in 1929 and now used primarily for basketball and hockey. Although the upper balcony is raked at a steep 37 degrees, it has a maximum of 12 rows. So you're unlikely to feel like you're at 30,000 feet as you watch the Blackhawks fly across the ice.

An additional comfort factor is that the steep profile of Chicago Stadium's upper balcony is hidden within the building's exterior walls. In contrast, the raking diagonal profile of Comiskey's upper deck is plainly visible as it reaches skyward. That makes the ballpark feel steeper than the basketball-hockey stadium, even if it isn't in reality.

A game of nuances

Baseball, of course, is entertainment of a different order than the Chicago Symphony or even the Chicago Bulls. It is a game of nuances-the pop of a fastball in the catcher's mitt versus the soft thud of an off-speed pitch-so it thrives on intimacy. It is a performing art that lacks the explosiveness of a Michael Jordan slam-dunk, so its drama needs to be magnified to captivate the fan.

That's what happend in 1983 when Sox sluggers Ron Kittle and Greg Luzinski blasted five home runs onto the roof of old Comiskey after home plate was moved 8 feet closer to the outfield fences.

Everyone in town was talking about the "roofers," and Luzinski even appeared in a color poster that showed him standing on old Comiskey's roof.

Tagging a four-bagger onto the outfield concourse at new Comiskey just doesn't have the same swashbuckling cache. When Big Frank Thomas sends one out there, the yawning spaces of stadium shrink his achievement rather than making the homer-and Big Frank-seem larger than life. It's not a matter of hitting the ball a long distance, but of overcoming some barrier that adds dramatic weight to the deed.

There certainly are other factors that explain why the fourth-place Cubs are averaging 32,989 a game in comparison to 32,302 for the first-place Sox. They include Comiskey's location across the Dan Ryan Expressway from the Robert Taylor Homes public housing project (which may scare some fans away) and the broad reach of Cubs games of superstation WGN-TV (which gives the North Siders a built-in tourist audience).

But ultimately, Comiskey's woes can be pinned on the fact that it is separated from Wrigley by a 20-minute ride on the Howard-Dan Ryan rapid transit line. That makes Chicago the only city in America where baseball fans have a choice between a real, old-time ballpark and a modern stadium.

At Wrigley, baseball still is played at a human scale, a characteristic reflected in the construction of the park (built in 1914 to the design of Zachary Davis Taylor, the same architect responsible for old Comiskey).

You sense that Wrigley's ivy-covered walls were built, brick by brick, by human beings, not machines. The steel trusses that support the park's roofs and upper deck have a lattice-like, Tinker Toy quality; you can see the parts that make up the whole instead of a monolithic superstructure of concrete.

Wrigley puts the upper deck fan closer to the action than Comiskey. The distance from home plate to the front row of the upper deck is 145 feet, 15 feet closer than Comiskey. And it's 210 feet from home plate to the back row, 40 feet nearer than Comiskey.

These close-in vantage points combine with the 30-degree slope of the upper deck to shape the closest thing in baseball (with the possible exception of Boston's Fenway Park) to the intimacy of Orchestra Hall.

New Comiskey lacks such intimacy because it was built like a sandwich-a moneymaking sandwich.